Member since November 2026
Pattie Belle Hastings is a speaker, workshop facilitator, and author who helps leaders and teams reclaim their attention and use it to crack open their problems worth solving. She is the founder of Mindful Marks, a Design Thinking, Innovation Sprint, and Technology Detox consultancy, and Professor of Interactive Media + Design at Quinnipiac University, where she has chaired two departments and serves as an M&T Bank Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellow.
Hastings speaks and leads workshops on four connected topics: Digital Wellbeing (Technology Detox and Cognitive Sovereignty), Design Thinking, Innovation Sprints, and Embodied Leadership in the Age of AI. She is the creator of the U.N.P.L.U.G. Technology Detox framework and the 30 Days of Less Tech program, a 30-day behavior and culture change sprint that companies and campuses use to restore focus, improve meetings and protect deep work, without tech-shaming or blanket bans.
Her workshops are hands-on, structured and playful. She has led Design Thinking training for staff of the Guggenheim and Yale, annual creative leadership workshops for LeadingAge Massachusetts and Loomis Communities, and programs for organizations including Pfizer, IBM, the Yale Center for British Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. She has presented at Sprint: Asia’s Biggest Design Thinking Summit, Teachers College at Columbia University, MacWorld Expo and conferences across the US and Europe, and pitched at the 2025 Yale Innovation Summit.
Hastings has studied how people live with technology since the early 1990s. As a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oslo, she researched mobile interaction design and led workshops at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Volda University College. Her award-winning design and artists’ books are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art Library and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
She is the author of The Sprint Handbook (2024), the 30 Days of Less Tech Workbook (2025), and has The Cognitive Sovereignty Workbook forthcoming. She holds a BFA and an MFA in Visual Art + Design.
I believe attention is the raw material of every good idea, every good decision, and every real relationship, and right now it is being harvested faster than we can protect it. My passion is helping people take it back and spend it on what matters: generating deep work for problems worth solving, making things with their hands and minds, and leading with presence instead of panic.
I’ve watched the relationship between people and their devices since the early 1990s, first as an artist and designer, then as a Fulbright researcher studying mobile technology, and now as a professor watching students and colleagues fight for focus. I want technology to be a tool, not a takeover.
I light up when a room full of people who walked in distracted and stuck walks out aligned, laughing, and holding a prototype, an actionable plan, or a new boundary they can keep. I’m especially drawn to universities, healthcare, eldercare organizations, non-profit teams, creative institutions, and teams doing creative or strategic work that needs deep focus and human ingenuity.
LeadingAge Massachusetts
I was leading a half-day Design Thinking workshop for the LeadingAge Massachusetts Leadership Academy – a room of eldercare leaders who didn’t think of themselves as creative. Within hours they were building rough 3D prototypes for problems they’d lived with for years, and when I read the feedback forms, one takeaway said simply: we need creativity in improving elder care. Another said, “We can all do design thinking,” and that’s the whole point of my work. This workshop series, which ran for many years, used a scaffolded “Novelty VS Relevance” exercise to ideate solutions for elder care transition issues. The participants were tasked to pursue novelty by designing “Carnival Rides for 90-Year-Olds” and then extrapolating the lessons to create relevant experiences for their residents.
The Fulbright year in Oslo
In 2008 I moved to Oslo as a Fulbright Scholar to study how people were using mobile devices, right as the smartphone was landing in everyone’s pocket. I spoke on Mobile Misuse at multiple conferences and events during my year of residency at the University of Oslo and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. That December I sat in the audience at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony as former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari was honored for decades of patient peace work, the slow, human work of bringing people together. I’ve spent every year since asking whether the devices we use are doing that work, or undoing it.
Cyborg Mommy
In 2000, as the internet was moving into our kitchens and living rooms, I created a multimedia performance called Cyborg Mommy: Everything I Know About Computers I Learned From Mother and took it from Connecticut to New York to Vermont to the UK to a digital culture conference in Bergen, Norway. Cyborg Mommy was also a 10 page feature in Art Journal magazine. It asked what happens to our bodies, our families and our sense of self when machines become part of how we care and connect. Back then audiences laughed; today, when the machine talks back, the question isn’t funny anymore.
Description: Stuck in the same brainstorms with the same ideas? This hands-on session walks teams through the five stages of Design Thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) on a real challenge from their own organization. Participants sketch, build quick prototypes and test ideas, and leave with an actionable solution and a Design Thinking Dashboard to keep using the method.
Learn more about Design Thinking Workshops.
Key takeaways:
Audience: Corporate and nonprofit teams, healthcare and eldercare leaders, museums and arts organizations, educators, startups.
Formats: Keynote with interactive exercise; half-day (3-4 hours); full day (6 hours); multi-day deep dive; in person, virtual or hybrid.
Selected Events: Guggenheim and Yale staff, full-day workshop (2024); LeadingAge Massachusetts Leadership Academy and Loomis Communities, annual workshops (2016-2019); The Sprint: Asia's Biggest Design Thinking Summit, virtual (2021); Teachers College, Columbia University (2013).
Description: Our attention is being chopped into confetti by notifications, infinite scroll and back-to-back meetings. In this high-participation session, Pattie Belle Hastings introduces the U.N.P.L.U.G. framework (Understand, Notice, Plan, Let go, Use offline alternatives, Generate support) and gives audiences practical boundaries that fit real workloads. No tech-shaming, no blanket bans: tech as a tool, not a takeover. The workshop version leads into 30 Days of Less Tech, a structured team program with a kickoff, daily workbook, check-ins and an integration session.
Learn more about the UNPLUG method.
Key takeaways:
Spot the triggers and habit loops that pull attention away
Choose two or three "friction fixes" for meetings, messaging and notifications
Build a realistic relapse plan for busy seasons and crunch times
Leave with shared team agreements, not just good intentions
Audience: HR, L&D and wellness teams; managers; university student success, faculty development and staff development offices; associations.
Formats: 45-60 minute keynote; 90-minute workshop; 30-day corporate or campus program; virtual or in person.
Description: AI tools can draft, summarize and decide faster than we can. The risk is not that they replace us but that we quietly stop using the parts of our minds that make us valuable. Drawing on her forthcoming Cognitive Sovereignty Workbook, Pattie Belle Hastings shows audiences how to stay the author of their own thinking: when to use AI, when to step away, and how to rebuild focus, memory, and original thought.
Key takeaways:
Audience: Knowledge workers, educators, students, leaders adopting AI, professional associations.
Formats: Keynote; workshop; future 30-day program (the 30 Days of Cognitive Sovereignty Workbook will be published in December 2026).
Description: Organizations that can ideate, test and decide quickly win. Based on Google Ventures’ Design Sprint and Pattie Belle Hastings’s book The Sprint Handbook, this training teaches teams to design and run their own time-boxed sprints, align cross-functional groups and validate ideas before spending money. Teams work on a live business challenge and every participant gets a copy of The Sprint Handbook.
Learn more about Innovation Sprints.
Key takeaways:
How to plan, facilitate and close a high-impact sprint
Methods for fast decisions without endless meetings
In-house capacity to run sprints without outside consultants
Audience: Innovation and product teams, strategists, facilitators, university entrepreneurship programs, business leaders.
Formats: Keynote; 1-day Sprint Fundamentals; 2-day Facilitation Bootcamp; 5-day guided sprint; in person or virtual.
Selected Events: Ideation Kit session, The Sprint: Asia's Biggest Design Thinking Summit (2021); M&T Bank Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (2024).
LeadingAge Massachusetts
I was leading a half-day Design Thinking workshop for the LeadingAge Massachusetts Leadership Academy – a room of eldercare leaders who didn’t think of themselves as creative. Within hours they were building rough 3D prototypes for problems they’d lived with for years, and when I read the feedback forms, one takeaway said simply: we need creativity in improving elder care. Another said, “We can all do design thinking,” and that’s the whole point of my work. This workshop series, which ran for many years, used a scaffolded “Novelty VS Relevance” exercise to ideate solutions for elder care transition issues. The participants were tasked to pursue novelty by designing “Carnival Rides for 90-Year-Olds” and then extrapolating the lessons to create relevant experiences for their residents.
The Fulbright year in Oslo
In 2008 I moved to Oslo as a Fulbright Scholar to study how people were using mobile devices, right as the smartphone was landing in everyone’s pocket. I spoke on Mobile Misuse at multiple conferences and events during my year of residency at the University of Oslo and the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. That December I sat in the audience at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony as former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari was honored for decades of patient peace work, the slow, human work of bringing people together. I’ve spent every year since asking whether the devices we use are doing that work, or undoing it.
Cyborg Mommy
In 2000, as the internet was moving into our kitchens and living rooms, I created a multimedia performance called Cyborg Mommy: Everything I Know About Computers I Learned From Mother and took it from Connecticut to New York to Vermont to the UK to a digital culture conference in Bergen, Norway. Cyborg Mommy was also a 10 page feature in Art Journal magazine. It asked what happens to our bodies, our families and our sense of self when machines become part of how we care and connect. Back then audiences laughed; today, when the machine talks back, the question isn’t funny anymore.
Description: Stuck in the same brainstorms with the same ideas? This hands-on session walks teams through the five stages of Design Thinking (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test) on a real challenge from their own organization. Participants sketch, build quick prototypes and test ideas, and leave with an actionable solution and a Design Thinking Dashboard to keep using the method.
Learn more about Design Thinking Workshops.
Key takeaways:
Audience: Corporate and nonprofit teams, healthcare and eldercare leaders, museums and arts organizations, educators, startups.
Formats: Keynote with interactive exercise; half-day (3-4 hours); full day (6 hours); multi-day deep dive; in person, virtual or hybrid.
Selected Events: Guggenheim and Yale staff, full-day workshop (2024); LeadingAge Massachusetts Leadership Academy and Loomis Communities, annual workshops (2016-2019); The Sprint: Asia's Biggest Design Thinking Summit, virtual (2021); Teachers College, Columbia University (2013).
Description: Our attention is being chopped into confetti by notifications, infinite scroll and back-to-back meetings. In this high-participation session, Pattie Belle Hastings introduces the U.N.P.L.U.G. framework (Understand, Notice, Plan, Let go, Use offline alternatives, Generate support) and gives audiences practical boundaries that fit real workloads. No tech-shaming, no blanket bans: tech as a tool, not a takeover. The workshop version leads into 30 Days of Less Tech, a structured team program with a kickoff, daily workbook, check-ins and an integration session.
Learn more about the UNPLUG method.
Key takeaways:
Spot the triggers and habit loops that pull attention away
Choose two or three "friction fixes" for meetings, messaging and notifications
Build a realistic relapse plan for busy seasons and crunch times
Leave with shared team agreements, not just good intentions
Audience: HR, L&D and wellness teams; managers; university student success, faculty development and staff development offices; associations.
Formats: 45-60 minute keynote; 90-minute workshop; 30-day corporate or campus program; virtual or in person.
Description: AI tools can draft, summarize and decide faster than we can. The risk is not that they replace us but that we quietly stop using the parts of our minds that make us valuable. Drawing on her forthcoming Cognitive Sovereignty Workbook, Pattie Belle Hastings shows audiences how to stay the author of their own thinking: when to use AI, when to step away, and how to rebuild focus, memory, and original thought.
Key takeaways:
Audience: Knowledge workers, educators, students, leaders adopting AI, professional associations.
Formats: Keynote; workshop; future 30-day program (the 30 Days of Cognitive Sovereignty Workbook will be published in December 2026).
Description: Organizations that can ideate, test and decide quickly win. Based on Google Ventures’ Design Sprint and Pattie Belle Hastings’s book The Sprint Handbook, this training teaches teams to design and run their own time-boxed sprints, align cross-functional groups and validate ideas before spending money. Teams work on a live business challenge and every participant gets a copy of The Sprint Handbook.
Learn more about Innovation Sprints.
Key takeaways:
How to plan, facilitate and close a high-impact sprint
Methods for fast decisions without endless meetings
In-house capacity to run sprints without outside consultants
Audience: Innovation and product teams, strategists, facilitators, university entrepreneurship programs, business leaders.
Formats: Keynote; 1-day Sprint Fundamentals; 2-day Facilitation Bootcamp; 5-day guided sprint; in person or virtual.
Selected Events: Ideation Kit session, The Sprint: Asia's Biggest Design Thinking Summit (2021); M&T Bank Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (2024).